Please don't try to guess where the location permission chrome will be. Also, your site is completely useless if I don't want to give you permanent permission to access my location. You should let users enter a location or zip code if they don't want to give you live access to their exact location.
I'm curious, but why are so many people against sharing their location through the browser? You already give up your OS, browser version, and IP address (which can give a rough location) just by visiting the website. I understand if someone personally has something against sharing their precise physical location, but I don't understand why it's an issue for so many people.
That's a huge difference. I keep feeling like there is this generation of very naive programmers out there. Yes, it's true, the IP address can be used to determine where you are on a mobile phone ... If you get a subpoena!
There's a big difference from "Sure, by using this phone, I know Homeland Security can find me" and "I guess I will let every website I visit know where I am; what the hell, privacy is a commodity!"
This attitude seems very strange to me. It is certainly in line with this "new way of thinking about privacy" but it has really nothing to do with reality.
I think he was referring to Geo-IP location (approximating your location based on your ip address). About 60-75% of the time it's accurate to the city - provided you're not using mobile broadband.
Of course there are a number of other ways to get higher resolution location without consent. An older but commonly known one is Samy's XSS exploit (http://www.samy.pl/mapxss/).
Um...because most people don't want to share their precise physical location just to get local movie times? Zip code is close enough for good enough results.
Lots of neat stuff here. "Event listings"--movies, music, etc.-- can still improve a lot in terms of ease of use, so I'm very happy to see people work in this area.
A few thoughts:
- I'd want more movie options & theaters (need a much bigger radius).
- When a single movie has showtimes at multiple theaters, the action on the map confused me at first.
- I personally know where my local movie theaters are. I do care very much about which theaters are available for a movie, because they vary in quality and convenience, but I have to hover over showtimes to see the theater options for a particular movie. So there may be a different UI which helps me optimize my decision (e.g. with less emphasis on the map)
- Title says "pick tonight's movie", but I can't actually figure out how to see the showtimes for later tonight--movies with a lot of showtimes are only showing the midday options.
- Can ads be removed from the video trailer? Seems unpleasant to see an ad during an ad. Also, normal video controls would be handy.
Can you hook into another movie trailer service? Perhaps Apple trailers? I imagine that since trailers are Ads, there might be a service that provides some sort of affiliate commission, or at least shows them without ads and without fees.
The UI is very cool! The Google Maps window loads very quickly when hovering over various show times. I immediately understood how this app could be useful. I also like the big high-res trailers.
Using Firefox 10 on my Windows 7 desktop machine, I clicked allow on the location sharing prompt, but the location it pulled was way off from my actual location. I assume it's going off my ISP location. I couldn't find any way to manually edit my location? I totally get the motivation to make it "just work" without a bunch of input from the user, but it seems you need a way to allow for fixing the location by the user.
Some of the locations it showed me movie times were quite far from me, which is OK -- the additional options were fine. But the next question that popped into my head when I saw the combination of a showtime and a location is "When do I have to leave?" A read-out of "You need to leave at X:XX to be on time for this movie" would be useful.
The placement of the "Get Tickets" link under each movie made it tricky to move the mouse there from the showtime link I had settled on without tripping over another showtime link -- kind of like that game where you move the ball through the maze! Clicking the showtime link just took me to a blank white page -- I assume this is not intentional.
hm, can't reproduce that here with the same setup... the address, latitude, longitude and zipcode returned from google's geocoding api must have been insanely long to exceed the 5MB quota. sorry that happened :(
Quota is based on domain, and in your case you're serving up everything from dl.dropbox.com. Maybe these users already have stuff in their localStorage from other sites that happen to use that domain?
Seems like the fix for that would be to serve up the html on your own domain so that other sites, eg dropbox, won't mess with your quotas.
Also, that would fix the location permission dialog that says "dl.dropbox.com wants to track your location".
This is a pretty neat idea. One thing I'd consider changing is your use of the Rotten Tomatoes rating icons. You're using the Tomatometer Critics icons, but the % score you're displaying is actually the audience rating. This may not matter most of the time, but occasionally you have a movie like "A Thousand Words" that has a 0% tomatometer rating, and a 60% audience rating. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a-thousand-words/). Mixing up the two ratings could be a little misleading.
It may be better to just include both ratings on there, or stick with a single rating source.
Good point. The behavior is actually to use critics score unless the critics score isn't available (0 for A Thousand Words triggered that), in which case it falls back to use the audience score, if it's available. I'll think about this a bit more, thanks for pointing it out!
Definitely think you're on to something here. Contrary to other commenters, I actually like that you're taking advantage of the geo location api. You should include an option for zip code and/or city, but personally what you have it fine.
Your UI is a bit bare, but nice and simple. Don't add too much to that. Simple is good.
Also love that the trailer auto-plays, which is contrary to how I want to experience video on most sites. However, since your site is about movies, auto-playing the trailer is a perfect implementation.
Ping me on Twitter, @geuis. I'd like to be informed as you further develop the site.
Where are you pulling the movie times data from? I've been trying to make a local application but couldn't find an API anywhere, it came down to web scraping, which isn't very sustainable.
I'm not sure that there are any other. It's my understanding that the main movie sites (Google, Yahoo!, RottenTomatoes, MovieTickets…) all get their info from one of these two companies. This is also probably why you won't find a free API with that data.
Because the trailers are on YouTube, I suspected that the info was scraped from Google (I believe these two companies have their own trailer hosting); however, that would then make the connection between that info and RottenTomatoes a bit tricky… Peter, do you mind sharing?
I'm not very familiar with backbone.js so it's a little confusing to me, but looks like models are being built. Here's what I can muster, this could all be wrong
* [Line 341] Theatres & Times from Yahoo (http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=use "store://VZHvlyU81L6BFVGyE7CNhT" as pterodactyl.movietimes; select * from pterodactyl.movietimes where zipcode="<zipcode>" and date="<date>"&format=json) -- I have no idea what this is all about. Any insight would be helpful.
Something to do with gamma.firebase.com and firebase.js isn't loading. I kept it going for two minutes and it kept buttering the popcorn. Maybe HN shot over your daily API quota?
My user story: I got excited that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was still playing, but didn't want to see it tonight because I have other plans. I clicked on the link to buy tickets, hoping it would show me other showtimes, but it was just a normal checkout page.
I would like to know when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is playing tomorrow as well.
It's nice & simple. I think trailers would be a great addition.
As an alternative -- I would be interested in a site just like this but that aggregated movies from all of the free (legal) sources on the Web where I can watch movies now. (I don't usually buy movie tickets in advance.)
Didn't work in Firefox even after allowing (the suggestion to "Allow" lined up in Chrome, though). Loaded the site in Chrome, and no movies were found in my area despite being within 10 miles of two movie theaters.
I love it. I go the movies all the time. I wish you had a way for me to put my email address in so I could get an email every Friday to remind me this site exists. Cool idea and implementation. Keep going!
Because people like my self don't need the gov knowing where and how I move to use this info against me due to my back problem and CUTTING ME OFF of suport so I can't take care of my two kids...
Not working for me. After I click 'Allow', the page remains the same, with the prompt telling me to click 'Allow'. I'm on Chrome 17.0.963.79, OSX, Austin TX.
